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www.inefficiency.org

 Celebrating inefficiency
  (+10, -2)(+10, -2)
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The ideology of all the e-commerce and dotcom mania stresses efficiency. Yawn. I am not going to argue here wether they succeed or not, I just want to stress that inefficiency is not much appreciated outside of the French countryside it seems (guess where I am having my holidays).

The target audience of this ineffeciency.org website would be the worldwide elite of cultured and/or creative-artistic people that appreciate inefficiency.

The site is of course password protected. Maybe a Flash animation first. Then you are invited to write a long e-mail message to the webmaster explaining why you, of all people, should get access to that website. A few weeks later the password is e-mailed to you. Or send by USPS-mail. Before you can get access you should contribute something. Like a receipe for some forgotten dish from the middle ages. In French and German only. Or a few chapters of a not yet published sci-fi book. Handwritten scanned pages of course.

I am not sure about what the structure of the website should look like. It should be labourintensive anyway. I was thinking about SimpleText as HTML-editor.

Please annotate, this entry should exceed the 0900-RENTARAPE idea in lenght.

—rrr, Aug 13 2000

INTERCAL http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/intercal/
The programming language of choice for such a site. [jutta, Aug 13 2000]

COBOL http://dailynews.ya...to_the_party_1.html
You can use COBOL in Web pages now. [hippo, Aug 13 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

www.inefficiency.org http://www.whois.ne...nefficiency&tld=org
Register it now! [hippo, Aug 13 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

goofing off http://www.halfbake.../idea/Goofing_20off
[mrthingy, Aug 13 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

http://www.inefficiency.org/ taken? [Spacecoyote, Dec 05 2007]

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       And it should offer a search engine also. But then with the best search results presented last and the worst as best. It should be avoided that the search engine presents exactly the opposite of what you are looking for since you might be tempted to change your query to the opposite also. That would be too efficient.
—rrr, Aug 13 2000
   

       you have to do those annoying fade in and dissolve effects that take for ever to load and look like CRAP! and play music in the background....but not midi, full uncompressed wave. and who needs a flash intro, make it in flash then export it to an avi so no plug in is required....make it full frames, un compressed, 1024x768....it should only take about two weeks to download. or if you do do it in flash, (no, not a typ0 or fecal matter) make a skip intro button that just reloads the site, causing the fade ins, waves, avis, flash, (OOOOOHHH! who could forget javascript news scrollers, as well as a java window prompt!) try this site, its kinda like what you want! http://www.re-Quest.net/thanx.htm
—cybercyph, Aug 14 2000
   

       The site should have no memory for user profiles. You have to fill in every detail every time, no matter how repetitive or redundant. And the entire text of the relevant help screen(s), plus maybe some that aren't strictly speaking relevant, comes up every time you have to type in any information.   

       Oh, definite requirement: no ASCII. Have somebody handwrite the entire "text" longhand, cut the longhand original into individual characters, scan the characters as GIF files, and have a unique GIF file for every single character in the text. Rewrite and rescan the entire site after any editing.   

       And the "help" screens, if not the entire "text," should be eviscerated by obfuscation.
—Uncle Nutsy, Aug 14 2000
   

       You might just want to set a redirect to this page we're on. It just wasted 2 minutes of my time already.
—BigThor, Aug 15 2000
   

       Perhaps I should stress more that the site is about celebrating inefficiency. So in the end it should be fun, rather than that it just bores the hell out of you. In that sense, the flash animation is not a good idea, but the password protection and access upon request is useful. By making it harder to enter the clique that actually does makes it worthwhile. I am afraid it requires a tough editorial policy. Each contribution should be motivated and thought over thoroughly.
—rrr, Aug 15 2000
   

       Having reached a page in the www.inefficiency.org website there will be no navigation buttons except a 'Home' button which will go back to the start (enjoy that Flash intro animation again) and the 'Back' button will be disabled.
Naturally the whole thing will be enmeshed in a fantastic porridge of frames, making it impossible to discover what the URL of any individual page is.
Pages themselves will be HTML, but served up by an ASP server.
—hippo, Aug 15 2000
   

       Re: the search engine idea... Rather than reverse the order (worst match to best match), the results should be presented in random order, preferably translated into a random language (spanish, english, french, (hexidecimal or binary perhaps?) etc, but different for each page of results).   

       Also, one randomly chosen link on each page should be made to close your browser window rather than take you where the link normally would.
—PotatoStew, Sep 10 2000
   

       Shouldn't it be "www.thisistheinneficiencyorgsitehere [admin: grrr] 1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJ [admin: enoughalready] KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZmydogiscalledfluffy.org" ?
—Jim, Sep 10 2000
   

       These are some great annotations on achieving inefficiency, but we need some more thought on the "celebrating" part. As rrr suggests, the inspiration is the lifestyle in the French countryside, where the tradition embraces the wisdom that the quickest, most efficient or most productive route is not always, or even often the most enjoyable. So inefficiency that promotes frustration is undesirable, but inefficiency that results in something beautiful or fun or otherwise stimulating is the goal.   

       rrr, please correct me if I've gotten this wrong. By the way, don't they also have a similar life-view in Italy?
—beauxeault, Nov 03 2000
   

       I feel that the Italian view celebrates chaos, rather than mere inefficiency. Doubters can try joining a queue in Rome, or driving a car in Naples.
—Monkfish, Nov 04 2000
   

       Yes, beauxeault you've hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what this is about. Celebrate the inefficiency that makes life worthwhile. The members of the website should have the feeling that they are part of a big family (now *that* is inefficient! family-life...) where any stupidity is welcomed. No matter how crazy or pointless, we love you nevertheless. Unlike your employer, who asks efficiency from you. Sort of like halfbakery.com really ;-)
—rrr, Aug 25 2001
   

       Promoting Inefficiency in an ineffecient way is very inefficiently beautiful.
—can1073, Dec 04 2007
   

       Search engine? Certainly, as at many websites, that sould pop up with the results: We did not find any matches for the information you are looking for. You may not have permission to examine these pages. and zero links.   

       Any links should automatically be designed to popup as a separate window, which your popup blocker will block until you tell it to always accept popups from this website... which will allow all the website's advertising popups to cover the screen at random times.   

       The Help screen's search topics should include only one entry "Help" which would lead you to their table of contents.   

       Please provide links to this 0900 RENTARAPE idea.   

       Sp: Length
—ye_river_xiv, Dec 06 2007
   

       This isn't really about inefficiency, is it? It's about maximising un-monetised goods (or, more generally, un-quantifiable goods) instead of monetary (or otherwise quantifiable) goods.   

       For example, I suppose that the French countryside is probably quite efficient at producing long and tasty lunches for the great majority of its inhabitants. Overall efficiency or ineffiency is just a question of how you pick your maximand.
—pertinax, Dec 10 2007
   

       Indeed, [pertinax]; but that's only the half of it. One needs to ask if the very concept of efficiency can survive a closed (e.g. ecological) system, as efficiency is something determined by the interface of a system with things external to the system. If nothing is external to the system the ideal ceases to be maximum efficiency but becomes optimum efficiency, which long and tasty lunches could very conceivably represent.   

       Compare for instance E F Schumacher's frequent suggestion that our dominant system of economy fails for being too productive by far. Or take the obvious example: why does cow dung burn if a cow is such a naturally efficient thing? Why is there so much energy left in the cow's feed after the cow is done with it? The answer is that a cow is as efficient as it ought to be, no less but also no more. A new, high-efficiency cow, as the purveyors of supposedly eco-friendly "new clean technologies" would foist upon us, would make a total mess of an already compromised planet in a very short time.   

       This has indeed been the experience of the past forty years.
—Ned_Ludd, Dec 10 2007
   

       This was meant to be my anno from 2000. Sorry so late. Meanwhile I learned something about efficiency.
—pashute, Jun 26 2013
   


 

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